In Part 1, I proposed the hypothesis that the art of moral story telling could be used as a diagnostic feature for detecting the emergence of human culture as distinct from animals. In other words, human beings tell moral stories and animals do not.
To substantiate this hypothesis, this post examines the research article, Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling.
The abstract states that "storytelling is a human universal". This is the basis of my hypothesis in a nutshell. By storytelling, the authors include both producing and consuming stories, whether around a camp-fire or for the television. To collect data, they went on-site among the Agta people, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population. Relevantly, this population group is believed to be descendants of the first colonizers of the Philippines over 35,000 years ago. While this is not an isolated population, in fact many claim some level of affinity to the Christian faith, much can be learned from them about storytelling as it has impacted the human experience from the deep past. The Agta maintain cultural practices that are tens of thousands of years old and the stories they tell are an integral part of maintaining that culture.
What's in a Story
To address storytelling in a scientifically rigorous manner demands that what is meant by a story must be clearly defined. Here, storytelling is defined to encompass a spectrum of narrative forms, from ritualized storytelling in large groups to day-to-day anecdotal conversations. The components of a story include character, setting, events, causal connections, and resolution; they may be fictional or non-fictional; and they may be used to broadcast social norms concerning such issues as sex, marriage, sharing obligations, and norm-breakers. Some stories may be merely a humorous joke or the details of a past experience.
Thinking about stories this way, it is easy to see that storytelling is an integral and obvious part of the human experience. Imagine for a moment a group of Neanderthal or of early modern humans sitting around a camp fire eating a fresh kill. One way to analyze the intelligence of such creatures is to look at the artifacts around the campsite. How sophisticated were the stone tools that were employed to butcher the animal? What techniques did they employ to fashion the weapons for the hunt? These questions are asked in part because they can be answered. But other questions, ones to which we also really want to know the answers, are quite a bit more difficult to probe. Did they tell jokes? Did they relate the exploits of the hunt to those who stayed back at the camp? Did one of them stand up and recite the story of a lesson learned handed down from their ancestors? If not, then they were not behaving in a human way; but if so, then they were. That at least is my premise.
The Critical Role of the Storyteller
In the study of the Agta people group, the reputation of individuals was assessed to determine who were the most skilled storytellers compared to who where the most skilled at hunting and gathering and to find out how important storytelling is to individuals and groups. To learn this, they also examined the reproductive success and desirability as a camp-mate for each individual. A critical finding was that for both men and women, skilled storytellers tend to have more children and are more desired as camp-mates than skilled hunter-gatherers. Furthermore, the researchers conclude that storytellers may perform an important role in hunter-gatherer societies by organizing cooperative systems through serving the function of 'broadcasting' cooperative norms. Storytellers convey a strong message of cooperation, sex and social equality, and inequality aversion. The stories told appear to promote cooperation within a camp and also empathy toward strangers.
The research uncovered that there is an individual benefit to being a skilled storyteller. This benefit is reflected in increased reproductive success and the receipt of greater resources. This provides a pathway by which storytelling, a behavior that benefits a whole group, can increase over time through individual-level selection. In other words, if the capability to tell stories can be passed on to one's offspring, then once a group gains a good storyteller, its future generations should have an increasing and steady supply of good storytellers. From this, it would be expected that the capacity to tell stories, and by extension to hear and be moved by them, would quickly become fixed, that is ubiquitous, within a population.
This study also suggests that storytelling facilitates widespread human cooperation and furthermore that storytelling and cooperation are mutually reinforcing. Once storytelling was introduced into the world, it may have literally exploded onto the scene as the most transformative element in human history.
However, in order to tell a story, the teller and the listener need a language.
The Origin of Language
Steven Anderson, in his book, Languages: A Very Short Introduction, estimates that the age of spoken language began between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago and writes:
"Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered... because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction."
The Biblical story of Adam resonates with the assertion cited above that "language was invented only once." Genesis 2:19-20 states that "God brought [every beast and bird] to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds... and to every beast...". Not only was God dialoging with Adam, but Adam was also responsible for dramatically expanding the vocabulary of the language that they were using. God may have taught Adam some basic language, and then Adam filled it out and passed it on. We can thus entertain the hypothesis that Adam was the God-tutored inventor of human language.
Humans are designed by God to live in community. But Adam lived alone in a garden planted for him by God and to which God had led him. Genesis 2:18-20 carries the narrative forward: "It is not good that the man should be alone" so "[God] will make a helper fit for him" because "there was not found a helper fit for him" among "every living creature". God solved this problem through the special creation of a woman to whom Adam gave the name Eve. Eve was made of the same stuff as Adam. She was just like him.
If Adam lived any time before 40,000 years ago, then there would also have been Neanderthal on the earth at that time, and other early modern humans. But as the story goes, these other creatures were not fit for Adam. I suggest that they were not fit because they were not capable of learning to dialog in a human language. They were not fit to tell stories and to be moved by them. Eve on the other hand could relate to Adam human-to-human. They both spoke with God and they spoke with each other, relating in part via the mechanism of storytelling. Adam and Eve had sons and daughters who presumably inherited their storytelling ability, thus founding the world's first community of humans interacting through story.
In a well-known Greek story a Titan named Prometheus makes humanity from clay and gives them fire stolen from the gods by which they are to found civilization. But science tells us this story is wrong. Fire was not stolen from God but is a natural phenomena probably first mastered by hominins such as Neanderthal. Furthermore, the use of fire did not bring about the sudden emergence of human communities. Rather, it is the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the genesis of storytelling that seems much more fundamental to humans and their civilization and much more aligned to the understood science. The real heroes are the Bible's Adam and Eve through whom was brought the power of story, not as something stolen, but as a gift given by God.
The Origin of Us All
Adam and Eve's descendant Cain is told to have founded a city. The Hebrew word translated city implies a guarded settlement providing a safe place to sleep at night. It seems that this accomplishment would have required various modes of storytelling to elicit cooperation and to sustain a community as revealed by the study of Agta hunter-gatherers. In Acts 17:26, Luke writes "[God] made from one man every [ethnic group] of mankind to live on all the face of the earth...". That all people groups would owe their heritage to Adam, the original bringer of language, makes sense seeing that language is such a powerful medium by which to group people.
The Bible reveals deeper truths than what science can uncover on its own. The Bible answers the why questions. Why did God make man and give him the gift of storytelling? The Apostle Luke answers this in Acts 17:26: "that they should seek God.. and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us." This destiny that God has for mankind through Adam -- to find and to know and to tell of God -- has the art of storytelling in its core.
From the perspective of Bible-believing Christians, it seems somewhat obvious that Adam is the first human and that he spoke a human language and was the father of all nations. But from a scientific perspective, the puzzle has to be put together piece by piece before the picture becomes clear. Perhaps the scientific picture is beginning to look like a familiar old story-- a story about one man and one woman and their encounter with God which changed the world forever and began the story of us all.
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